It works for some, but not all. An overblown launch event for a tech company is likely to garner lots of attention and an immediate backlash — especially when the demo turns into a complete and utter trainwreck.

Airtime shot for the moon this morning. The celebrity-laden launch event at Milk Studios in the Meatpacking district reflected the big, big ideas Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning (but mostly Sean Parker) have for their video chat website. When Jimmy Fallon (and Olivia Munn and Alicia Keys and Snoop Dogg and Ed Helms and Jim Carrey and Joel McHale and Martha Stewart and Julia Louis-Dreyfus) tell us a site is going “blow our pants off,” it had better deliver.

But Airtime is just a video chat website: During the 45-minutes we waited for the event to begin, I polled members of New York’s tech journalism army and got similar answers from everyone: It’s just video chat on Facebook. With random people, if you want.

Not exactly a revolution (and yes, I concede that we journalists can get caught up in ironic detachment from what we cover). I’ll admit the app is very frictionless, and if I were a bored teenager, I might use it to see which of my friends are free to chat, something I’d probably already do on Gchat or Skype.

But to hear it from Parker, though, you’d think it was the second coming of Napster. “We’re trying to rewire the social graph,” Parker declared. Airtime incorporates several trendy, of-the-moment, big ideas:

For one, it’s real time. Parker noted that, finally we have a real time Internet, but we’re apparently not using it. (Methinks Twitter would disagree.) Games like Draw Something, and others on Zynga, are turn-based and asynchronous, he said. Yes, but what about Turntable.fm, a once-hot, real time application that users complained was “too engaging”?

Second big idea: Airtime is using the “Interest Graph.” There are two schools of thought on the Interest Graph: One is that common interests lead to stronger bonds between strangers than the ones you have with the people you already know, therefore, the Internet should harness the Interest Graph to connect people. After all, anonymous message boards and chatrooms are part of the Internet’s roots (not to mention, even how Parker and Fanning met). Serendipity is a favorite word of Interest Graph advocates. Thus, apps ranging from Highlight to Tagged to The Experience Project all focus on the connecting people through the Interest Graph.

The other school of thought is that people already have enough friends and connections and can barely manage the ones they have. We’re not online to meet strangers — that’s for bored or lonely people, the argument goes.

Parker falls into the former category, arguing that Airtime’s random Chatroulette function, which allows users to video chat with a random person based on shared interests imported from Facebook makes the Internet “interesting” again. The Web has become boring, because everything is filtered through the lens of a social graph, and it’s stifling self-expression, he said.

There was also mention of “Big Data.” I have no idea where that fits into this, but it got thrown out there several times. And “gamification.” Airtime has a little point and badge system, it appears. Oh, and no penises. Airtime has designed some sort of porn-detecting algorithm that will prevent it from turning into the porn pit Chatroulette became known as.

Big ideas and big events are Sean Parker’s speciality. The party he threw for Spotify featured Snoop Dogg, Jane’s Addiction, the Killers, bottle service, a roast pig, and lobsters. Today’s launch event was almost as over-the-top. Meanwhile Parker’s startup track record is laden with big, awesome ideas, from Facebook to Plaxo to Napster. Except he’s been kicked out of each one.

With events like today’s, it would be easy to say Silicon Valley has gone Hollywood, a bubble is afoot (what is Airtime’s business model?), and we’re all doomed. I will admit, when the demo went sideways, and Airtime froze several times, it was better to have comedians like Joel McHale, Olivia Munn, and Ed Helms cracking jokes to fill the awkwardness than the nervous Parker or soft-spoken Fanning. The question is whether the celebrities and the cornucopia of big ideas are merely papering over the staying power of the actual app.

Erin Griffith covers New York startups for PandoDaily. She's worked as staff writer for Adweek and a private equity blogger for peHUB. Her writing has appeared in Venture Capital Journal, BBC.com, Time Out New York, Huffington Post, FT.com, and BUST. She plays keyboard in a band called Team Genius and Tweets as @Eringriffith.

Facebook has introduced Scrapbook, a new feature that allows parents to share and collect images of their children in one place without requiring them to worry about tagging their kids’ face with each other’s names just to make sure they don’t miss what the other person has posted. [Source: Facebook]

“For all the clumsy rhetorical lip service [former Yahoo News head] Guy Vidra pays to The New Republic’s hallowed intellectual traditions, this is what his vision of a nimble digital news product finally translates into: a vaguely journalistic veneer strategically designed to conceal a rancid interior of ‘elevated’ advertising.”

Indian e-commerce company Flipkart is said to be raising $600 million in its latest bid to compete with Amazon. The company is also said to have garnered a higher valuation with this funding round — quite the feat, considering it was previously valued at around $11.5 billion. [Source: The Economic Times]

Here comes another unicorn: Sprinklr, a New York-based marketing company, has raised $46 million at a $1.17 billion valuation. The funds will be used to help the 700-person company expand its marketing platform. [Source: Fortune]

Curator, the tool Twitter created so the media could find and share tweets with its audience, is now available to the public. Because if there’s anything people wanted to see more of, it’s tweets randomly inserted into blog posts, television spots, and other forms of media. [Source: TechCrunch]

A court in France has decided not to ban Uber’s low-cost services until the country’s highest appeals court, or its supreme court, weigh in on the constitutionality of a new transport law. [Source: The Wall Street Journal]

Tinder is refocusing on its spam-fighting efforts in the wake of reports that movie studios are using the service to promote their movies, scammers are attempting to steal information via the app, and pranksters have created tools that trick heterosexual men into flirting with each other. [Source: The Verge]

Uber offers drivers whose accounts have been deactivated a choice: attend a class that requires them to pass an exam, or take a class that doesn’t. The latter has been informed by Uber employees, and the company has sent thousands of drivers to it, according to a report from BuzzFeed. Why is that a problem? Because Uber isn’t supposed to provide its drivers with formal training; doing so makes them bona fide employees, not independent contractors. [Source: BuzzFeed]

Flipboard users will now be able to collect articles and share them via private magazines visible only to members of certain groups. The feature is aimed at students working in the same class, companies sharing press coverage, and other groups that might want an easy way to share Web pages with each other without having to use public tools like Facebook or Twitter. [Source: Flipboard]

T-Mobile has tasked its customers with creating a real-world coverage map that makes it easier to tell where its service works and where it doesn’t. Instead of guessing at where its customers will get service — which is what other carriers do, the company claims — it’s asking people to verify its predictions so it can be more honest with consumers. [Source: T-Mobile]